Meteor launches Galaxy Developer Edition with hourly pricing for app hosting

Meteor Development Group, the startup behind the popular Meteor JavaScript framework, announced today that it will be rolling out a new Developer Edition of its Galaxy service for building and hosting apps that use Meteor. It’s convenient because it’s priced by the hour, not on a monthly or annual basis.

“[W]e know the current price of Galaxy is out of reach for many members of our community,” Matt DeBergalis, cofounder and chief executive of Meteor Development Group, wrote in a blog post. “Our Team, Business, and Enterprise plans are really for production apps that already need scale, high availability, and high-touch support.

“That being said, we understand that many developers don’t need all of this. So today we’re taking a small but important step towards giving you the Galaxy you deserve, at prices that make sense for all apps.”

The service will cost 3.5 cents per gigabyte per hour, or around $13 per container per month, DeBergalis wrote.

This might well appeal to people who like Meteor a lot — the framework enables developers to use JavaScript for both server and client code for web and mobile apps — and want to just focus on designing applications with it, not deploying and monitoring those applications on cloud infrastructure such as Amazon Web Services. In that sense it’s a Meteor-focused platform as a service (PaaS).

San Francisco, California-based Meteor Development Group announced a $20 million funding round in May.

People interested in using the new Galaxy Developer Edition can now request an invitation for it.